Monrovia, March 23 -- On a morning last October, more than 50 women and men walked into Paynesville magistrates' court and told the prosecutors everything. They described a compound next to Vice President Jeremiah Koung's Gbankpa Town home, where they had been lured with false promises of help to get jobs in Canada or Australia. They described the 27 men and women who they said had tortured, trafficked, stolen, starved, and rape them. One victim has vanished and was feared murdered. Within days, eleven suspects were under arrest. It should have been, by any measure, a breakthrough in the exploding crime of human trafficking that was destroying the lives of poor Liberians across the country.

It was not.

For years Liberians had been watch...